338 Ecological Restoration and Design
The case of Ivanhoe, Virginia, illustrates this point. The first effort of the Ivan-
hoe Civic League following its founding in the mid-1980s was to gain control of a
shell building from the county government in the hope that the community would
be able to attract an industry to occupy the building. Following major efforts to
obtain an industry, the Civic League concluded that adult education and youth
programmes would be more beneficial to the community. By the year 2003, the
Ivanhoe Civic League continues to work to make Ivanhoe a better place for all of
its citizens. The education programme consists of community-based Adult Basic
Education/General Education Development (ABE/GED). The Ivanhoe Civic
League’s education programme offers college classes, youth tutorials that include
guidance on college and careers, professional development workshops and com-
puter and adult literacy classes. In 1993, a vocational component rehabilitated a
historic structure in Ivanhoe to provide office and education facilities for the Ivan-
hoe Civic League.
The citizens of Ivanhoe decided that the assets of their community – their
culture and the beautiful setting – should be shared by those who share their vision
of a positive future for the community. In the mid-1990s, the Ivanhoe Civic League
inaugurated the Volunteers for Communities, now a separate organization, which
is currently training 17 communities throughout the region to host volunteers.
Community service and celebration continue to play a major role for the Ivanhoe
Civic League. They host an annual all-community Christmas party, a Thanksgiv-
ing Prayer Service and a week-long Jubilee festival, as well as many other commu-
nity events. They built bonding social capital to help determine the vision and
built bridging social capital to mobilize resources to be locally invested for an Ivan-
hoe where young people and elders prospered together.
Coaching: A new approach to self-help
Although self-help assumes that most of the assets for change will come from the
inside and that the energy for change will be generated from within, a number of
experiences show how coaches and facilitators can act as brokers to identify assets
and passions within the community and link them with appropriate collaborators
to achieve entrepreneurial visions (Sirolli, 1999) or community visions (Rubin,
2001, p497). Box 18.1 shows how coaching and a strategic visioning process
helped a community college–community team move toward equitable economic
development.
Technical assistance model
In contrast to the self-help model, the technical assistance model stresses the task
that is to be performed. A few local leaders might decide that the community
needs a golf course. After talking among themselves in private, they call in techni-
cal experts to assess the local situation and to find the most efficient way to build
and run a golf course. The construction of the course might require receiving